At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell Page A

collaborators in the radical new spirit of transcendental phenomenology’.
    For him, Heidegger’s philosophical error was to remain on the level of the ‘natural attitude’ or‘common sense’. This seems an odd accusation: what could be wrong with that? But Husserl meant that Heidegger had not cast off the accumulated assumptions about the world that should have been set aside in the epoché . Obsessed with Being, he had forgotten to do a basic step in phenomenology.
    For Heidegger, it was Husserl who was being forgetful. His turn inwards into idealism meant that he was still prioritising the abstract contemplative mind rather than dynamic Being-in-the-world. From the start of Being and Time , he makes it clear that he wants no theoretical investigation, no mere list of definitions and proofs, but a concrete investigation, starting from whatever Dasein is doing at the moment.
    That’s mere‘anthropology’, retorted Husserl in a lecture of 1931. Starting with concrete worldly Dasein means giving up on the high aspirations of philosophy and its search for certainty. Husserl could not understand why Heidegger did not seem to get it — but Heidegger was less and less interested in what Husserl thought. He was now the more magnetic figure, drawing Husserl’s protégés away.
    Heidegger’s Being and Time initially conjures up a seamless world of happy hammerers, communing with their fellows in their shared Mitsein while having a vague proto-understanding of Being which they never pause to think about in detail. If that were all there was to Heidegger, he probably would have inspired less passion — and if that were all there was to human life, we would hardly be interested in philosophy at all. Who would need philosophers in such a zipless world? Fortunately for the profession, zips get stuck; things break. And Heidegger analyses what happens next.
    So I am hammering the cupboard; I am barely aware of the hammer at all, only of the nail sinking home and my general project. If I am typing a paragraph about Heidegger on the computer, I pay no attention to fingers, keyboard or screen; my concern streams through them to whatever it is I am trying to achieve. But then something goes wrong. The nail bends, or perhaps the whole hammerhead flies off the shaft. Or the computer freezes on me.
    For a moment, I stand staring stupidly at the broken hammer, or, instead of looking through the computer, I stare angrily at the contraption and jab at its keys. What had been ready-to-hand flips into being present-at-hand: an inert object to be glared at. Heidegger sums up this altered state with the catchy phrase das Nur-noch-vorhandensein eines Zuhandenen —‘the Being-just-present-at-hand-and-no-more of something ready-to-hand’.
    Examples of this crop up frequently in everyday life. In Nicholson Baker’s novel The Mezzanine , a riveting phenomenological account of one man’s lunch break, the protagonist pulls on a shoelace to tie it, but the lace snaps. Dumbly staring at the fragment in his hand, he flashes on similar incidents: the moment when one pulls on a thread to open a Band-Aid and the thread comes loose instead of tearing the paper, or the moment when one tries to use a stapler but, instead of biting through and closing the staple tightly on the other side, it‘slumps toothlessly’, revealing itself as empty. (I read the book twenty years ago, and for some reason this little description stuck so fast that I rarely find a stapler out of staples without a murmur of ‘It’s slumped toothlessly’ going through my mind.)
    When such things happen, Heidegger says, they reveal‘the obstinacy of that with which we must concern ourselves’. This revelation lights up the project in a different way, together with the full context of my concern with it. No longer is the world a smoothly humming machine. It is a mass of stubborn things refusing to cooperate, and here I am in the middle of it, flummoxed and disoriented — which